Você está na página 1de 4

No.

21 July 29, 2014

A Case Against Child Labor Prohibitions


by Benjamin Powell

Halima is an 11-year-old girl who clips loose threads


off of Hanes underwear in a Bangladeshi factory.1 She
works about eight hours a day, six days per week. She has
to process 150 pairs of underwear an hour. At work she
feels very tired and exhausted, and sometimes falls asleep
standing up. She makes 53 cents a day for her efforts. Make
no mistake, it is a rough life.
Any decent persons heart would go out to Halima and
other child employees like her. Unfortunately, all too often,
peoples emotional reaction lead them to advocate policies that will harm the very children they intend to help.
Provisions against child labor are part of the International
Labor Organizations core labor standards. Anti-sweatshop
groups almost universally condemn child labor and call for
laws prohibiting child employment or boycotting products
made with child labor.
In my recent book, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the
Global Economy, I argue that much of what the anti-sweatshop movement agitates for would harm workers and that
the process of economic development, in which sweatshops
play an important role, is the best way to raise wages and
improve working conditions. Child labor, although the
most emotionally charged aspect of sweatshops, is not an
exception to this analysis.
Benjamin Powell is the director of the Free Market Institute,
professor of economics in the Rawls College of Business at
Texas Tech University and a senior fellow with the Independent
Institute. This article excerpts from his recent book, Out of
Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014).

We should desire to see an end to child labor, but it has to


come through a process that generates better opportunities for
the childrennot from legislative mandates that prevent children and their families from taking the best option available
to them. Children work because their families are desperately
poor, and the meager addition to the family income they can
contribute is often necessary for survival. Banning child labor
through trade regulations or governmental prohibitions often
simply forces the children into less-desirable alternatives.
When U.S. activists started pressuring Bangladesh into eliminating child labor, the results were disastrous.
Effects of Child Labor Bans
In 1993 Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Child
Labor Deterrence Act, which would have banned imports
from countries employing children. In response, that fall
Bangladeshi garment companies let go approximately 50,000
children. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, It is
widely thought that most of them have found employment
in other garment factories, in smaller, unregistered subcontracting garment workshops, or in other sectors.2 That
makes the introduction of the bill seem simply ineffective.
The Department of Labor is sugarcoating the situation. Paul
Krugman summarizes what happened more bluntly: The
direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped
employing children. But did the children go back to school?
Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam,
which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even
worse jobs, or on the streetsand that a significant number
were forced into prostitution.3 Based on the information
they have, families tend to choose the best available job for
their children. Taking that option away does not eliminate

Cato Institute 1000 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C., 20001 (202) 842-0200
fax: (202) 842-3490 www.cato.org

the necessity of work; it forces them to take a less-desirable


job. As repulsive as a child working in a sweatshop may be,
it is not nearly as repulsive as a child forced into prostitution
through the actions of unthinking Western activists.
The Bangladesh story is a dramatic one, but it illustrates
the general point that when children lose factory jobs they find
less desirable jobs to replace the jobs they lost. In countries
where sweatshops locate, child labor is often the norm, and
most of the children work in less remunerative sectors with
fewer opportunities for advancement than manufacturing, such
as agriculture or domestic services.
In 2003 the World Bank measured the percentage of children aged 10 to 14 that were working in most countries.4 As
Table 1 shows, child labor is not uncommon. Rates of child
labor range from a high of nearly 27 percent of children in
Bangladesh to a low of 3.3 percent in Costa Rica.5
The World Bank also collects data on the economic
sectors in which children are employed. Figure 1 presents
the distribution of employment of economically active
children between the ages of 7 and 14 by sector.6
In seven of the nine countries for which data exists, most
children were employed in agriculture, often by a wide margin.7 In the two exceptions, Costa Rica and the Dominican
Republic, the leading sector employing children was service. India had the highest proportion of children employed
in manufacturing, and there it was a little over 14 percent.
Protests against sweatshops that use child labor implicitly
assume that ending child labor in sweatshops by taking away
the option to work in a factory will, on net, reduce child
labor. Evidence on child labor in countries that have sweat-

shops indicates that is wrong. It is not a few bad apple


firms exploiting children in factories. Child labor is common.
Employment in agriculture is not necessarily safer, either. A
1997 child labor survey showed that 12 percent of children
working in agriculture reported injuries, compared with 9 percent of those who worked in manufacturing.8
Child Labor and Economic Development
The thought of Third World children toiling in factories
to produce garments for us in the developed world to wear
is appalling, at least in part because child labor is virtually
nonexistent in the United States and the rest of the more
developed world.9 Virtually nowhere in the developed
world do kids toil long hours every week in a factory in a
manner that prevents them from obtaining schooling.
Children typically worked throughout human history, either
long hours in agriculture or in factories once the industrial
revolution emerged. The question is, why dont kids work
today? Rich countries do have laws against child labor, but so
do many poor countries. In Costa Rica the legal working age
is 15, but an ILO survey found 43 percent of working children
were under the legal age.10 Similarly, in the United States,
Massachusetts passed the first restriction on child labor in
1842. However, that law and other states laws affected child
labor nationally very little.11 By one estimate, more than 25
percent of males between the ages of 10 and 15 participated
in the labor force in 1900.12 Another study of both boys and
girls in that age group estimated that more than 18 percent of
them were employed in 1900.13 Economist Carolyn Moehling
also found little evidence that minimum-age laws for manu-

Table 1
Percentage of Children Age 1014 in Labor Force in Selected Countries

Country

Proportion of Children (%)

Bangladesh

26.5

Brazil

13.4

China

5.5

Costa Rica

3.3

Dominican Republic

11.5

El Salvador

10.3

Haiti

21.4

Honduras

5.5

India

10.7

Indonesia

6.8

Burma

22.0

Nicaragua

8.9

Thailand

10.0

Source: The World Bank.

Figure 1
Percent of Economically Active Children Employed by Sector
Agriculture
90

Percentage Employed

71.3
62.1

20

40.3

34.1

12.7

10

35.3
25.8

24.9

23.3
15.4
8.2

4.6

66.4

50.5

49

50
40

62.5

57.5

55.1

60

30

Manufacturing

79.2

80
70

Services

18.5
9.5

9.8

12.9

9.4

14.2
12

7.3

Source: The World Bank.

facturing implemented between 1880 and 1910 contributed


to the decline in child labor.14 Similarly, economists Claudia
Goldin and Larry Katz examined the period between 1910 and
1939 and found that child labor laws and compulsory schoolattendance laws could explain at most 5 percent of the increase
in high school enrollment.15 The United States did not enact a
national law limiting child labor until the Fair Labor Standards
Act was passed in 1938. By that time, the U.S. average per
capita income was more than $10,200 (in 2010 dollars).
Furthermore, child labor was defined much more narrowly when todays wealthy countries first prohibited it.
Massachusettss law limited children who were under 12 years
old to no more than 10 hours of work per day. Belgium (1886)
and France (1847) prohibited only children under the age of
12 from working. Germany (1891) set the minimum working
age at 13.16 England, which passed its first enforceable child
labor law in 1833, merely set the minimum age for textile
work at nine years old. When these countries were developing, they simply did not put in place the type of restrictions
on child labor that activists demand for Third World countries
today. Binding legal restrictions came only after child labor
had mostly disappeared.
The main reason children do not work in wealthy countries is precisely because they are wealthy. The relationship
between child labor and income is striking. Using the same
World Bank data on child labor participation rates we can
observe how child labor varies with per capita income.
Figure 2 divides countries into five groups based on their
level of per capita income adjusted for purchasing power
parity. In the richest two fifths of countries, all of whose
incomes exceed $12,000 in 2010 dollars, child labor is virtually nonexistent.

It is only when countries have an income less than $11,000


per year that we start to observe children in the labor force.
But even here, rates of child labor remain relatively low
through both the third and fourth quintiles. It is the poorest
countries where rates of child labor explode. More than 30
percent of children work in the fifth of countries with incomes
ranging from $600 to $2,000 per year. Economists Eric
Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik econometrically estimate that 73
percent of the variation of child labor rates can be explained
by variation in GDP per capita.17
Of course, correlation is not causation. But in the case
of child labor and wealth, the most intuitive interpretation is
that increased wealth leads to reduced child labor. After all,
all countries were once poor; in the countries that became
rich, child labor disappeared. Few would contend that child
labor disappeared in the United States or Great Britain prior
to economic growth taking placechildren populated their
factories much as they do in the Third World today. A little
introspection, or for that matter our moral indignation at Third
World child labor, reveals that most of us desire that children,
especially our own, do not work. Thus, as we become richer
and can afford to allow children to have leisure and education,
we choose to.
Conclusion
The thought of children laboring in sweatshops is repulsive. But that does not mean we can simply think with our
hearts and not our heads. Families who send their children
to work in sweatshops do so because they are poor and it is
the best available alternative open to them. The vast majority of children employed in countries with sweatshops work
in lower-productivity sectors than manufacturing. Passing
3

Figure 2
Percent of Children Age 10-14 in Labor Force by Country Income Quintile
35%

Percentage in Labor Force

31.04%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%

7.35%
4.58%

5%
0%

0.01%

0.16%

> $24K

$11K$24K

$6K$11K

Source: The World Bank.

$2K$6K

$600$2K

Income
7. The World Bank database does not include data for Vietnam,
but Eric V. Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik, Child Labor in the
Global Economy, Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1
(Winter 2005): 204, report that 92 percent of children working in
Vietnam in 1998 worked in agriculture.
8. Kebebew Asshagrie, Statistics on Working Children and
Hazardous Child Labour in Brief, Geneva: International Labor
Organization (1997).
9. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that
18 percent of children aged 5 to 14 are economically active
worldwide. Of these, it estimates that 94 percent of them are in
low-income countries, and only 2 percent are in what it classifies
as developed countries. ILO, Every Child Counts: New Global
Estimates on Child Labour, Geneva: ILO (2002).
10. International Labor Organization, Summary of the
Results of the Child and Adolescent Labour Survey in
Costa Rica, Geneva: ILO (2002), http://www.ilo.org/ipec/
ChildlabourstatisticsSIMPOC/Questionnairessurveysandreports/
lang--en/index.htm.
11. The remainder of this paragraph and the next draws on
research found in Joshua C. Hall and Peter T. Leeson, Good for
the Goose, Bad for the Gander: International Labor Standards
and Comparative Development, Journal of Labor Research 28,
no. 4 (September 2007): 65876.
12. Robert Whaples, Child Labor in the United States, in
EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. R. Whaples, retrieved from http://
eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.childlabor.
13. Samuel Lindsay, Child Labor in the United States,
American Economic Association 8, (February 1907): 256259.
14. Carolyn Moehling, State Child Labor Laws and the Decline
in Child Labor, Explorations in Economic History 36, no. 1
(1999): 72105.
15. Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, Mass Secondary Schooling
and the State: The Role of State Compulsion and the High
School Movement, NBER Working Paper No. 10075 (2003).
16. France and Prussia both had earlier laws prohibiting child
labor, but they were not enforceable. See Hall and Leeson (2007).
17. Edmonds and Pavcnik, (2005): 210.

trade sanctions or other laws that take away the option of


children working in sweatshops only limits their options
further and throws them into worse alternatives. Luckily, as
families escape poverty, child labor declines. As countries
become rich, child labor virtually disappears. The answer
for how to cure child labor lies in the process of economic
growtha process in which sweatshops play an important
role.
Notes
Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University
Press.
1. National Labor Committee, Child Labor: 11 year-old
Halima Sews Clothing for Hanes, 2006. A video of this interview with Halima is available at http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=pTIfY9SmJdA.
2. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor
Affairs, 1994 Child Labor Report, Bangladesh, http://www.dol.
gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/sweat/bangladesh.htm
3. Paul Krugman, Reckonings; Hearts and Heads, New York
Times (April 22, 2001), p. 17. Similarly, UNICEF, The State of
the Worlds Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
http://www.unicef.org/sowc97/, reports that many of these children turned to prostitution.
4. World Bank, World Development Indicators, CD-ROM
(Washington: World Bank, 2005).
5. Mauritius is excluded from Table 1 because it is an outlier
that is not representative of the general situation as I explain in
Out of Poverty.
6. For each country, an average was taken for all years between
2000 and 2009 for which data are available.
4

Você também pode gostar